The state of Tennessee is divided into 805 individual 7.5-minute topographic quadrangle maps. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) maintains an archive of paper maps that were utilized for estimating groundwater well locations. Each well location was plotted by hand and marked with corresponding water well data. These hand-plotted locations represent the most accurate spatial information for each well but exist solely in paper format.
To create the shapefile of the well location data for this data release, individual paper maps were scanned and georeferenced. From these georeferenced map images (GRI), the hand-plotted well locations were digitized into a shapefile of point data using ArcGIS Pro. The shapefile, "TN_waterwell.shp," contains locations for 8,826 points from the first 200 7.5-minute quadrangles in Tennessee (sorted alphabetically) from Adair 438NW through Harriman 123NE. While some spring locations are included in this dataset, it does not provide a comprehensive collection of spring data. Attribute data includes quad name, drawing number, and hand-written identification data that was transcribed from the topo maps. Latitude and longitude coordinates (decimal degrees) were populated and incorporated into the attribute table. The projection is USA Contiguous Albers Equal Area Conic USGS (meters). A separate table with the attribute table data is included as "TN_waterwells_table.xlsx." Detailed descriptions of the attributes can be found in the accompanying metadata file named "TN_waterwells.xml."
The datasets on this page include:
TN_waterwells.shp - well location point data
TN_waterwells_tbl.xlsx - table of attributes
TN_waterwells.xml - metadata
